The Turkestan Governor-Generalship (Туркестанское генерал-губернаторство), commonly known as Russian Turkestan (broader geographic term), was the main colonial administration of the Russian Empire in Central Asia from 1867 to 1917. In contemporary British usage it was often styled the "Governor-Generalship of Turkistan". Established following the Russian conquest of Central Asia, it governed territories roughly corresponding to parts of present-day Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, with its capital at Tashkent. The region contained over 5 million inhabitants according to the 1897 census and covered an area of 1.7 million square kilometres. It operated under a frontier emergency-law regime that combined civil and military authority, notably the 1881 Law on "reinforced and extraordinary security" and the comprehensive 1886 Statute, which codified supervised indigenous institutions alongside imperial courts. The dual court system—imperial courts for Russian subjects and supervised qadi and biy courts for the indigenous population—became a defining feature of governance.
The governor-generalship operated as a frontier krai with a unique administrative structure combining military and civil authority under a single governor-general. It operated on a special frontier legal footing defined by the 1886 Statute; supervised "native" institutions were retained within an imperial administrative hierarchy.
The administration focused heavily on economic development, particularly cotton cultivation as import substitution following the American Civil War, and the construction of railways linking Central Asian markets to European Russia. By the early 1910s, Russia's trade with Central Asia (including Bukhara and Khiva) approached 400 million rubles annually, with cotton forming the principal export. The system faced increasing tensions over land alienation, resettlement policies, and wartime labour conscription, culminating in the widespread Central Asian revolt of 1916. Following the February Revolution of 1917, the governor-generalship was dissolved and replaced by the short-lived Turkestan Autonomy, which was suppressed by the Bolsheviks in early 1918. The region was subsequently reorganised as the Turkestan ASSR within Soviet Russia, with the imperial administrative boundaries later dismantled during the Soviet national delimitation of the 1920s.
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